Bede

                     (Or BEAD, whence Bedehouse, Bedesman, Bederoll).

                     The old English word bede (Anglo-Saxon bed) means a prayer, though the
                     derivative form, gebed, was more common in this sense in Anglo-Saxon
                     literature. When, in the course of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the use of
                     little perforated globes of bone, wood, or amber, threaded upon a string, came
                     into fashion for the purpose of counting the repetitions of the Our Father or Hail
                     Mary, these objects themselves became known as bedes (i.e. prayers), and our
                     modern word bead, as applied to small globular ornaments of glass, coral, etc.,
                     has no other derivation. In middle English the word bedes was used both in the
                     sense of prayer and rosary. Thus Shakespeare could still write (Rich. III, iii, 7)

                          When holy and devout religious men
                          Are at their beads [prayers], 'tis much to draw them thence,
                          So sweet is zealous contemplation.

                     While of Chaucer's Prioress we are told

                          Of smal coral aboute hire arm she bar
                          A peire of bedes, gauded al with grene.

                     The gauds, or gaudys, were the ornaments or larger beads used to divide the
                     decades. The phrase pair of beads (i.e. set of beads - cf. pair of stairs), which
                     may still be heard on the lips of old-fashioned English and Irish Catholics, is
                     consequently of venerable antiquity. With such speakers a pair of beads means
                     the round of the beads, i.e. the chaplet of five decades, as opposed to the whole
                     rosary of fifteen. Again, to "bid beads" originally meant only to say prayers, but
                     the phrase "bidding the beads", by a series of misconceptions explained in the
                     "Historical English Dictionary", came to be attached to certain public devotions
                     analogous to the prayers which precede the kissing of the Cross in the Good
                     Friday Service. The prayers referred to used to be recited in the vernacular at the
                     Sunday Mass in medieval England, and the distinctive feature of them was that
                     the subject of each was announced in a formula read to the congregation
                     beforehand. This was called "bidding the bedes". From this the idea was derived
                     that the word "bidding" meant commanding or giving out, and hence a certain
                     survival of these prayers, still retained in the Anglican "Book of Canons", and
                     recited before the sermon, is known as the "bidding prayer".

                     The words bedesman and bedeswoman, which date back to Anglo-Saxon times,
                     also recall the original meaning of the word. Bedesman was at first the term
                     applied to one whose duty it was to pray for others, and thus it sometimes
                     denoted the chaplain of a guild. But in later English a bedesman is simply the
                     recipient of any form of bounty; for example, a poor man who obtains free
                     quarters in an almshouse, and who is supposed to be bound in gratitude to pray
                     for his benefactors. Similarly, bedehouse, which originally meant a place of
                     prayer or an oratory, came at a later date to be used of any charitable institution
                     like an almshouse. It has now practically disappeared from literary English, but
                     survives provincially and in a number of Welsh place-names in the form bettws,
                     e.g. Bettws y Coed. Finally, bede-roll, as its etymology suggests, meant the roll
                     of those to be prayed for, and in some sense corresponded to the diptychs of the
                     early Church. The word is of tolerably frequent occurrence in connection with the
                     early English guilds. In these associations a list was invariably kept of departed
                     members who had a claim on their prayers. This was the bede-roll.

                     For beads in the sense of rosary, see ROSARY.

                     MURRAY AND BRADLEY, eds., The English Historical Dictionary (Oxford, 1884), I; ROCK, Church of
                     our Fathers (2d ed., London, 1904), II, 330; III, 107; SIMMONS, The Lay Folks' Mass-Book (Early
                     Eng. Text Soc., London, 1879) 315, 345.

                     HERBERT THURSTON
                     Transcribed by Anita G. Gorman

                                       The Catholic Encyclopedia, Volume II
                                    Copyright © 1907 by Robert Appleton Company
                                    Online Edition Copyright © 1999 by Kevin Knight
                                   Imprimatur. +John M. Farley, Archbishop of New York

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